Patients suffering from breathing disorders, including for example, sleep disordered breathing (SDB) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), are often advised to use a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device. CPAP devices use positive air pressure to keep the patients airways from collapsing as they breathe. There are two main types of CPAP devices. These include single or bi-level pressure CPAP devices that maintain a given pressure or set of pressures and auto titrating CPAP devices which rapidly change pressures in response to breathing events.
When a patient first obtains a CPAP device, it is common for them to visit a sleep clinic in order to determine appropriate pressure settings for their CPAP device. This is particularly true for single pressure or bi-level pressure CPAP devices, but can also include auto titrating devices. Sleep clinic evaluations can be costly and often require an overnight stay at the sleep clinic. Moreover, patients often visit a sleep clinic for a very short period of time, such as a single night, resulting in only limited information about the patient. Even after a sleep clinic visit, patient's often experience discomfort if the selected pressure for the CPAP device is not optimal. This necessitates a costly return visit to a sleep clinic.
Auto-titrating CPAP devices attempt to alleviate this problem by monitoring breathing patterns of a patient and then rapidly and automatically adjusting a pressure supplied to the patient based on the occurrence of any abnormal breathing events, without waiting to see if the events recur at that pressure. However, patients often do not tolerate the use of continuously adapting pressures over extended periods of time or prefer a single pressure once that single pressure is titrated optimally.